New York City private-sector workers whose employers don’t offer retirement savings plans would be able to squirrel away part of their paychecks for their golden years under a city-run program Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to create.

The program would make New York City the first city in the U.S. to offer its own retirement savings program for private sector workers who lack access to employer-sponsored retirement plans, de Blasio and other citywide elected officials said Thursday at City Hall.

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Several other states have already passed legislation to create state-sponsored retirement savings programs.

“We have a society in which too many people are struggling,” and “too many people are working and yet not secure. That’s not an acceptable equation,” de Blasio said.

"People should not be working their whole lives and end up with nothing,” he said.

De Blasio’s plan would allow private sector workers at businesses that have ten or more employees to automatically deduct money from their paychecks into a variety of investment benefit plans.

City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said the Council hopes to put forward legislation creating the program sometime in the next few weeks.

There’s a wrinkle, though. The city needs approval from the federal government before it can create the savings program, said John Adler, the director of the Mayor's Office of Pensions and Investments and chief pension investment advisor.

The Federal Department of Labor issued draft regulations in November of 2015 exempting states from the requirements of ERISA, the 1974 federal law that established liability standards and protections for private sector workers’ voluntary retirement plans. But the city needs the Department of Labor to go even further, specifically exempting cities from ERISA as well, in order to set up the savings plan.

Without that authorization, the retirement plan can’t go forward.

“We need the authorization from the Department of Labor,” de Blasio said Thursday.

The timing for that approval is uncertain. Adler said he believed the Department of Labor would approve the exemption sometime “during the Obama administration.”

After the city receives approval to set up the program, it would take a year to 18 months for it to become operational, Adler said. The program would be overseen by a board of trustees, but the city does not yet know who would be in charge of selecting the board’s members.

And it is still unclear whether the savings plan’s board would select investment managers who choose the offerings for employees savings plans, or contract out to a third party firm which would be in charge of selecting investment managers.

Unlike some private employers’ retirement savings programs, the program contemplated by the de Blasio’s administration would be funded entirely through employee contributions, and would not involve any kind of employer match.

And unlike a public sector pension plan, which is protected by the state constitution and whose benefits can’t be diminished even in an economic crisis, the retirement savings plan the city is proposing would be very much subject to the vagaries of the market.

“There are no guarantees,” Adler said.

Currently, 1.5 million New York City residents who work in the private sector don’t have the option of deducting money from their paychecks to help plan for retirement, a factor city officials said has contributed to a crisis among aging New Yorkers. Nearly three quarters, or 74 percent, of low-income private sector workers in New York City don’t have access to a retirement savings plan, Public Advocate Letitia James said Thursday.

Roughly 40 percent of city residents between the ages of 50 and 64 have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, even though a New Yorker would need to have saved $215,000 to live at poverty-level for a 15-year retirement. Social security benefits will provide the average New Yorker with roughly $16,000 a year in benefits.

A study conducted by the AARP shows that workers are 15 times more likely to save for their retirement if the money is automatically deducted from their paychecks.